Registration price for all participants (2 days): 125 Euros

General Information

If you are facing the big challenge of developing your own research software project only with the help of your laptop, this is the right workshop for you! In this workshop you will learn practical basics to make research software more discoverable, reusable and transparent, and how to use the HPC Cloud platform to help you to achieve your goals.

In particular, you will get an overview of good practices that will help you start your Open Source Software project. You will get some insight on helpful tools for unit testing, package management, continuous integration and containerisation.

You will also be learning how to use the high performance compute systems at SURFsara to enhance your research. In particular you will experience how to become the administrator of your own HPC environment using the HPC Cloud platform. Here you’ll be learning how to use the web application to create and manage virtual machines, with which you can run your tasks using the operating system and graphical interface of your choice.

Who:
The course is aimed at graduate students and other researchers, as well as anybody who would like to learn the basics for the development of open-source software and cloud-based services.

Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a
Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They should have a few specific software packages installed (listed below).
You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools
that will be presented at the workshop.

Click on "Next" four times (two times if you've previously
installed Git). You don't need to change anything
in the Information, location, components, and start menu screens.

Select "Use the nano editor by default" and click on "Next".

Keep "Use Git from the Windows Command Prompt" selected and click on "Next".
If you forgot to do this programs that you need for the workshop will not work properly.
If this happens rerun the installer and select the appropriate option.

If your "HOME" environment variable is not set (or you don't know what this is):

Open command prompt (Open Start Menu then type cmd and press [Enter])

Type the following line into the command prompt window exactly as shown:

setx HOME "%USERPROFILE%"

Press [Enter], you should see SUCCESS: Specified value was saved.

Quit command prompt by typing exit then pressing [Enter]

This will provide you with both Git and Bash in the Git Bash program.

The default shell in all versions of macOS is Bash, so no
need to install anything. You access Bash from the Terminal
(found in
/Applications/Utilities).
See the Git installation video tutorial
for an example on how to open the Terminal.
You may want to keep
Terminal in your dock for this workshop.

The default shell is usually Bash, but if your
machine is set up differently you can run it by opening a
terminal and typing bash. There is no need to
install anything.

Git

Git is a version control system that lets you track who made changes
to what when and has options for easily updating a shared or public
version of your code
on github.com. You will need a
supported
web browser.

You will need an account at github.com
for parts of the Git lesson. Basic GitHub accounts are free. We encourage
you to create a GitHub account if you don't have one already.
Please consider what personal information you'd like to reveal. For
example, you may want to review these
instructions
for keeping your email address private provided at GitHub.

For OS X 10.9 and higher, install Git for Mac
by downloading and running the most recent "mavericks" installer from
this list.
Because this installer is not signed by the developer, you may have to
right click (control click) on the .pkg file, click Open, and click
Open on the pop up window.
After installing Git, there will not be anything in your /Applications folder,
as Git is a command line program.
For older versions of OS X (10.5-10.8) use the
most recent available installer labelled "snow-leopard"
available here.

If Git is not already available on your machine you can try to
install it via your distro's package manager. For Debian/Ubuntu run
sudo apt-get install git and for Fedora run
sudo dnf install git.

Text Editor

When you're writing code, it's nice to have a text editor that is
optimized for writing code, with features like automatic
color-coding of key words. The default text editor on macOS and
Linux is usually set to Vim, which is not famous for being
intuitive. If you accidentally find yourself stuck in it, hit
the Esc key, followed by :+Q+!
(colon, lower-case 'q', exclamation mark), then hitting Return to
return to the shell.

Python

Python is a popular language for
research computing, and great for general-purpose programming as
well. Installing all of its research packages individually can be
a bit difficult, so we recommend
Anaconda,
an all-in-one installer.

Regardless of how you choose to install it,
please make sure you install Python version 3.x
(e.g., 3.6 is fine).

We will teach Python using the Jupyter notebook,
a programming environment that runs in a web browser. For this to work you will need a reasonably
up-to-date browser. The current versions of the Chrome, Safari and
Firefox browsers are all
supported
(some older browsers, including Internet Explorer version 9
and below, are not).

Download the Python 3 installer for Linux.
(The installation requires using the shell. If you aren't
comfortable doing the installation yourself
stop here and request help at the workshop.)

Open a terminal window.

Type

bash Anaconda3-

and then press
Tab. The name of the file you just downloaded should
appear. If it does not, navigate to the folder where you
downloaded the file, for example with:

cd Downloads

Then, try again.

Press Return. You will follow the text-only prompts. To move through
the text, press Spacebar. Type yes and
press enter to approve the license. Press enter to approve the
default location for the files. Type yes and
press enter to prepend Anaconda to your PATH
(this makes the Anaconda distribution the default Python).